British Tabloids Go Darker

Yesterday a name that was unfamiliar to me appeared on Twitter’s list of “trending” topics: Milly Dowler. I looked, and learned that Milly Dowler, a schoolgirl from Surrey, was murdered by a former nightclub bouncer named Levi Bellfield in 2002, when she was thirteen. The case was a big deal—Dowler was missing for six months before her body was found by mushroom pickers in the Hampshire woodlands—and it is poised to become even bigger one. Yesterday, the Guardian’s Nick Davies and Amelia Hill reported that Dowler’s voicemail had been hacked into, while she was missing, by a team of private investigators working for News of the World. The investigators listened to messages from Milly’s family members and friends. When the voicemail box became full, they deleted some of the messages.

Dowler’s phone isn’t the only one the paper hacked. I wrote about the scandal this winter, when the most prominent known victims were members of the royal family and Sienna Miller; to get a sense of its seriousness in Britain, imagine Jay Carney and Jill Abramson mixed up in something like this. But the Dowler case has struck a new, and deeper, chord, in part because the deletion of the messages gave her parents false hope that she might still be alive. It also could have compromised the prosecution of her killer.

David Cameron, the prime minister, interrupted a tour of Afghanistan to say that this was “a truly dreadful act.” Ed Miliband, the Labour party leader, impressively unequivocal, called for Rebekah Brooks, the editor of the paper at the time, and now one of Rupert Murdoch’s top executives in the United Kingdom, to “consider her conscience and her position.” Brooks, who has managed to continue relatively unsullied by the “dark arts” that the paper practiced—the previously revealed cases were after her tenure—is maintaining that she had nothing to do with the hacking: “I hope that you all realize it is inconceivable that I knew or worse, sanctioned these allegations,” she wrote today, in an email to her staff. Rebekah Brooks is also trending on Twitter. There will be an emergency debate on the matter in Parliament on Wednesday, amid calls for a public inquiry. It’s unlikely that Brooks is going to be able to sit this one out.

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